petite nuit

so last year there was nuit blanche, and they were gonna skip a year and have it again next year, but this year they had a little thing, a petite nuit!~

what this whole thing is is a late night contemporary art thing!  so that's kinda neat.  this one was indeed little, it only had 5 things.. instillations or whatever and i will tell you about them.
so..  the one i liked the best of course was this little lantern store type thing!  it was this little store that had all these items that were actually little lantern things and you got to go in and pick one!
it looked like this:

you had to line up and they let about 10 people in at a time and you had "exactly 1 min!" is what they told me when i first went in, to look around and pick something.

i took pictures as i looked...

my dad likes these..  cherry blossom things..

and a kitty puzzle!~

1min actually goes by pretty quickly, but i ended up picking a pack of thrills!
i also took some pictures of the stuff from outside..

ok..  so the other stuff..  the other stuff wasnt quite so neat..
there was this screen set up that was playing these films...

i am not sure if they were all by the same person or not?  cause this was the sign.. but i saw at least 3 different ones playing while i was there.  the first one was this guy playing a cello i think?  he was in this um..  like a viewing station where they watch for forest fires i think?  and it was him playing the music and these views from this tower.  the second one was this one here in the picture, it was this lady ironing.  she took clothes from the pile on the right and ironed them and then went behind the screen in the back and put them on and then put the clothes she took off on the pile in the left.  and the last one, well, i only watched a few seconds of it really and it was in a living room or something?  there was a rug, so that's why i say that, and there was a cockatoo walking on the floor and there was a dog that came into the frame and i think there was a cat in there and maybe some other animals?  who knows!!!

the third thing was a series of these boards i guess.. set up that had pictures of them of far away locations, travel destinations.. and they were set up so that you were supposed to be able to stand in front of them and take a picture and it would look like you were in that location..

 

it's a swell enough idea, but doing it at a night festival is perhaps not the best idea, cause there was all sorts of weird shadows and glares and stuff. i tried to take a picture of some of them and ugh..

see... what's that weird glare?  and no.. i didnt use a flash or anything like that.
but this one worked better.

then the 4th thing was this parachute thing with these colour changing lights on it!
that was pretty neat & i thought i might be able to get some neat pictures with it, but ugh.  if i actually participated in it i'd have to be holding onto the thing and not my camera right..  and i didnt really feel like running around and being in such close confined contact with a bunch of strangers.  i'm sure it would have been really pretty though!

i did stand by that little fence for a moment and try to take pictures of the lights from underneath, but it didnt really work too well.  i also took pictures of it just laying on the ground..

& the last one, well this one had some more potential, but i dont know..  it wasnt working too good i think.  what it was was these images of space stuff! projected onto the side of a building, and then you were supposed to
make these hand shadow thingies on them.

the problem i guess was that the light was out of focus or something like that?  maybe it wasnt strong enough..  whatever it was, it seemed like when people tried to do the hand stuff the shadows didnt really show up very good.  Also, on the website, i looked before, and it showed the hand things over top of the pictures and any time i saw people doing stuff it was on this vague light that goes over top of the whole thing..  so i dont know..   but i like the space stuff!

so that's it.
but before i went home, i went and stood in line to go back into that little store thing to get a little something for my dear joe!  
i could have got ya some sardines!

but i found something funnier!
i didnt get a picture of it in that little store, so i had to take a picture when i was waiting for the bus..

hee hee.

tree - green ash

ok!  right away another tree!  the green ash..  next to the american elm the green ash is the next most common tree in my community..   american elm and green ash are almost all the trees on the boulevards.  there many blocks that have just the two.  ...but also there are a bunch of different types of ash trees too, like summit and patmore.. and well, i dont know exactly what the difference is between them all yet, but oh well.  these are supposed to all be green ash (according the yeg tree map)

the tree has bunches of seeds..  however, some trees didnt seem to have any, i'm not sure why..  i am thinking that the seeds is probably going to be one of the easier ways to tell the different ash trees apart?

also some of the trees had these little.. things?  they were not on all of them and the ones they were on tended to be only on high branches so i wasnt able to get a good picture..

the leaves were opposite each other like this..

the bark was pretty light coloured..

they also had fairly distinct looking branches...

there was one that had already turned fairly yellow and i thought it looked rather pretty..  i was looking up at it and was gonna take some pictures and some guy walked by and asked me if there was a kitten up there.. i had to say nope.. just a tree.

and down by the school the whole block is all green ash, so here is a block of green ash..

trees! - american elm

so.. i had a plan, or, well.. something i wanted to do..  i had wanted to learn what a lot more of the trees and plants in the area are this summer.  thing is.. this past month or so kinda sucked and i didnt do much of anything and well..  life ya know.  but that doesnt mean that i cant start now..  only thing is is that the seasons are starting to change, but that's ok.
last fall i discovered the yeg Tree Map which is pretty amazing!  it has pretty much ALL the trees on public land listed, which are a lot, and i have used it to explore and discover a whole lot of new things.  it is not the most complete and accurate thing in the world, for instance there are a lot of very different looking varieties of crabapple trees and it just lists them as crabapple, and some newer trees that are not on or things like that, but for the thousands of trees in the city it's pretty damn fantastic.

now..  in the area around where i live the most common tree by far is the american elm!  there are whole blocks with nothing but elms on them.  actually, i read an interesting fact.. that there are over 60 thousand elms in the city and it's the largest concentration of disease free elms in the world, i'm not sure if it's true or not, but maybe?

ugh.  i forgot to take a picture of the leaves, which is kinda the most important part..  but i want to post this, so i'll just have to edit it and add it later.  oops.

this is what the bark looks like..

it's actually a pretty lovely looking tree, they grow large and twist into interesting shapes and create a nice canopy over the street.

and ta-da!
that is the first tree.. the american elm.